


Well, It's Not the Ritz

by novelogical (writingmonsters)



Category: Burnt (2015), Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Fluff without Plot, M/M, Questionable Crossover, in my defense i was left unsupervised
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-05-12 04:35:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19221700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writingmonsters/pseuds/novelogical
Summary: Aziraphale decides they ought to try somewhere new. After all, they've done the Ritz. And so, instead, they find themselves experiencing "Adam Jones at the Langham".





	Well, It's Not the Ritz

**Author's Note:**

  * For [misanthropiclycanthrope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/misanthropiclycanthrope/gifts).



> For Jake. Please enjoy this delightful bit of garbage. Ich liebe dich über alles <3

The black 1926 Bentley is doing eighty miles and hour through Marylebone, screaming along Regent Street, when Aziraphale blinks -- struck with sudden memory -- and lurch forward in the passenger seat. “Stop! Crowley, stop here!”

Crowley stomps the brake. Only divine -- or demonic -- intervention keeps them both from hurtling through the windscreen, smoke rising from the rubber tires.

“ _ What _ ?!” Crowley peers out over the bonnet, pulling down his sunglasses to cast around with panicked yellow eyes. “What is it? Have I hit someone?”

“No. No, of course not.” Though, Aziraphale will not deny there had been some close encounters near Grosvenor Square. “I was only thinking, there was this lovely dining establishment here… ah, see? There it is -- the Langham.” Established in the late nineteenth century, if he remembers right, though the last time he had visited had been somewhere in the late twentieth. The Prince and Princess had only just been married. “I had thought it might still be around here somewhere.”

Crowley wrings the steering wheel, exasperated, and does his best not to groan. He  _ loves  _ Aziraphale -- there, he has even admitted it -- he really does. But sometimes. “Feeling a bit peckish, are we?”

“Well, it’s only that I saw the nicest review in the papers,” Aziraphale has the decency to at least look a bit bashful about the whole business. “And they’ve just earned three Michelin stars, and I thought we’ve already done the Ritz, so perhaps…?”

And this. This eagerness, the bright-eyed hope, Aziraphale asking without quite using the words -- this is why Crowley loves him. He is already throwing the gearshift to set the parking brake, unfolding himself from the driver’s seat.

“It’s a date.”

With Crowley loping along behind him up Regent Street, Aziraphale beams up at the grand hotel’s facade and the world seems to grow sunnier as a result. “I’m so glad to find it’s still open,” he sighs appreciatively.

Crowley lifts his eyebrows, catching hold of the door as it swings open to gesture Aziraphale through. On the register, a table for two becomes available. And, it might not be the Ritz, but Crowley cannot deny the place has  _ style _ . Buzzing and alive with energy, all high ceilings and perfect white tables, London light streaming in through the bay windows. For all the new life and modernity breathed into the space, Crowley can still feel the history that clings to the bones of the place -- knows well how much Aziraphale appreciates it.

“Oh,” says Aziraphale, a soft exhalation of intrigue when he stops short in the vestibule. “They’ve changed the name.”

Simple, burnished-gold lettering:  _ Adam Jones at the Langham _ .

“Good afternoon, gentlemen.” A soft face -- smiling, polite -- and a warm Spanish lilt from behind the hostess’ podium. The barely noticeable sliver of a name tag on his lapel proclaims him to be  _ Tony _ and beneath that, smaller letters mark him as the restaurant’s maitre d’. “You are dining in today?”

“Yes!” And if this human is a spot of sunshine, Aziraphale manages to shine ten times brighter when he smiles. “Though, I’m afraid we don’t have a reservation…” The heavenly grey eyes flicker toward Crowley in askance. 

Crowley scrunches up his face and nods,  _ already taken care of _ . 

The maitre d’ runs a slim finger along the register of tables and reservations and requests, proclaiming with a hint of surprise “you are in luck.” 

There is something about the face, full and friendly, that makes Aziraphale blink. Look twice. He can’t quite put his finger on it -- he’s seen so many faces -- but maybe it’s the eyes? Warm, russet brown. Familiar. 

“We’ve had an opening for two,” Tony tells them, tucking a pair of menus under his arm and gesturing them both, with a sweep of his hand, into the dining room. “If you will follow me?”

They do. 

Crowley has miracled them up a perfect spot at one of the smaller tables -- tucked away in a corner and still silhouetted against a set of the high french windows. Two polished place settings on the crisply whitened tablecloth, a view of the dining room’s expanse and London passing steadily by outside.

“Please,” Tony insists. “If you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask. Can I get you something to drink?”

Aziraphale spares a glance toward Crowley, who offers up an ironic little gesture of deference. “Champagne,” he says. “If you would be so kind. A Ruinart  _ blanc de blancs, _ if you have it?”

They do. He is well aware of this.

Crowley, amused and bemused, listens as Aziraphale interrogates the maitre d’ on the particulars of the Langham’s menu -- specialty dishes, the particulars of preparing a proper risotto, the merits of seafood paella. How scandalized Gabriel would be, he thinks, to hear the wayward angel talk with such passionate delight. He is more than content to let Aziraphale, who knows his tastes, order for the both of them, focusing his attention on the parties scattered throughout the restaurant -- young and chic couples, a trio of businessmen who once upon a time he might have so easily tempted. Humanity. Fascinating.

When the maitre d’ gathers up their menus, turning on his heel with a smile and a nod, Crowley rolls his head on his shoulders to study Aziraphale from behind tinted lenses. “Champagne? What are we celebrating then, Angel?”

Aziraphale’s smile glows. “ _ Us. _ ”

And Crowley will gladly toast to that. 

Still smiling, Aziraphale resettles himself on his chair, sparing a moment to wonder whose reservation Crowley had neatly miracled from the Langham’s books. “You didn’t have to go to so much fuss,” he murmurs, though there had been little fuss required at all. Not even a snap of the fingers. “Any old table would have done.”

“That’s not as fun,” Crowley protests. Aziraphale knows  _ fun _ has little to do with it. “Y’know I am a demon, after all. Besides, you don’t get to order fancy champagne and then start chastising me for picking out a nice table.”

Aziraphale blusters. Scowls. Has to concede the point.

The champagne appears and Tony pours with a deft hand, golden bubbles fizzing and giddy and just the color of a faintly tarnished halo. Crowley lifts the champagne glass, touches it to Aziraphale’s with a faint chime, and neither one of them really needs to say a word.

It is enough just to be. Whole. Together. At peace.

“Oh!” Says Aziraphale suddenly, his eyes following the maitre d’ in his smart grey suit as he weaves between the tables, bending neatly at the waist to confer with guests. “I remember now. Bela -- _Balerdi_. That’s the name.”

Crowley lifts a single, articulate eyebrow.

The same corner table, but with a slightly different facade; thirty-odd years ago. Aziraphale had eaten the pigeon and there had been a boy -- smallish -- sat unattended at a table across the way, swinging his legs and working intently with a handful of crayons to decorate the backs of several discarded spreadsheets. 

“ _ All right, ‘Tonio. _ ” Aziraphale had been close enough to overhear when the man -- kitted out in suit and pager and clearly the boy’s father -- had appeared to ruffle his hair. “ _ Meetings are all done, are you ready to go home now _ ?”

A grin. Crayons and masterpieces carefully gathered up.

“ _ Mister Balerdi? Sir, just a moment… _ ”

Aziraphale had watched the smile slide instantly from the little boy’s face. 

“ _ Five more minutes, Tony. That’s all _ ,” Mister Balerdi had promised. They had both -- son and father -- looked at one another and known that it would take much longer. It always did. “ _ You will be good? _ ”

A nod.

“ _ I’ll be right back. _ ”

And Aziraphale was a Being of Light, an Instrument of Good, and so he had waited a polite interval before leaning across the space between the tables and asking “young boy, are you intrested in magic?” 

He had performed a proper bit of magic too -- among the card tricks and disappearing coins -- just a small miracle on the boy’s behalf. And he always remembered his miracles.

“Heavens,” Aziraphale murmurs thirty years later. “The world moves too quickly.”

Crowley sips at his champagne, nonplussed. “We’ve been around six-thousand years, you blink and you’ll miss a decade or ten.” Or take a nap that unintentionally spans the nineteenth century. “They go by like seconds, really.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Aziraphale concedes, swirling the contents of his glass.

“All relative, after all.” Crowley says with a practical little shrug of his shoulders. “For them? ‘S a lifetime. For us?  _ Blip _ .”

They savor the passage of minutes, then. The flux of the restaurant moving around them -- customers who come and go, waitstaff circling in a carefully coordinated dance. After six thousand years, Crowley and Aziraphale are attuned enough to one another that there are no words required between them. It is good company and good champagne and at least a halfway decent view watching the revolutions of the restaurant world and the two of them hold entire conversations about it all with just a nod, a smile, a faint incline of the head.

The commotion only a few tables away is just loud enough to immediately catch their attention. An impatient, unpleasant couple and Tony bearing the brunt of it with awkward grace and apologies. Aziraphale lifts his eyebrows. Crowley cocks his head.

“Incredible, isn’t it?” Crowley slouches in his chair, lets the wave of misanthropy wash over him, turning him philosophical -- not quite maudlin,  _ never _ maudlin. “All this saved, and they still go on being bastards to one another. They don’t have any  _ idea _ .”

Aziraphale peels his eyes away from the scene -- demands being made and the maitre d’ turns pink around the collar as he nods and apologies and argues with the utmost politeness, shrinking into himself with every snide, unfriendly barb.

“Well,” Aziraphale hums, considering. “I suppose that was the point, wasn’t it? That they  _ wouldn’t _ have an idea of what might have become of them all -- that way they might continue to make whatever choices they will. It’s --”

“ _ Ineffable _ ?” Crowley gives a full-bodied twitch. Indescribable, how much he loathes that word. He  _ likes _ to know things.

“Yes -- ineffable.” Aziraphale lifts his chin, only the slightest bit smug. “Precisely.”

“Hmph.”

Crowley slouches further.

Sporting a stain of Pinot Noir on his dress shirt, unable to be hidden no matter how he buttons his suit coat, and a harried expression, Tony reappears with their meals in hand. Still, somehow the picture of a perfect maitre d’ as he sets the table deftly.

“I apologize, gentlemen. We have had some delays in the kitchen -- is there anything else I can get for you?”

Aziraphale’s champagne flute refills itself.

“Nah,” Crowley drawls, pulling a face. “I think we’re all right. Angel?”

“Quite, thank you.”

The maitre d’s congenial expression flickers -- a brief twitch, softening his coffee-colored eyes. Angel. Demon. They are not men; but he cannot know that. All Tony Balerdi recognizes is that there is something about these two that is at least a little like himself. “Excellent.” 

When he turns to go, Aziraphale’s grey eyes follow. He cannot help it, he has always worried more than he should -- even in the very beginning he had worried. About the Right Thing, about the first humans and whether they would make out all right beyond Eden’s gates, about Crowley. “Poor dear,” he murmurs.

And he is sure that Tony thinks himself hidden from view in the vestibule of the butler’s pantry, but from their vantage point, Aziraphale and Crowley watch as he lets his shoulders slump. Rakes his hands through his hair and silently beseeches the ceilings for patience, for a moment’s peace. 

They may be angels -- one slightly more fallen than the other -- but they are not all knowing. Do not know that the deliveries had been late, that the phone in the kitchen’s back office has been inundated with calls, that a handful of homophobic words still sting beneath Tony’s skin, that he has not had a decent night’s sleep all week. But Crowley knows the look of misery on the boyish face, the way he scratches unconsciously at the tip of his nose and mutters curses.

And he knows Aziraphale.

Behind the lenses of his sunglasses, yellow eyes slide from Aziraphale to Tony and back again. Aziraphale gives him a  _ look _ . The look that telegraphs all too clearly,  _ oh please won’t you do something, Crowley? For me? _

“No.” It is the look that results in phenomena like Shakespeare, in stains magicked from coats, and rides given to strange girls on velocipedes who may or may not have been accidentally run over.

“Oh,” Aziraphale pouts. “Only a little miracle, don’t you think? Just to perk his day up a bit. You may be a demon, but a small happiness can’t hurt -- think of it this way, you are  _ tempting _ him to happiness.” 

He offers the logistical loophole with such proud enthusiasm, Crowley seriously considers it.

Before Crowley can blink the world into a different configuration, though, a pair of arms encircle the maitre d’ from behind. A rough-hewn man in a white chef’s jacket waltzing him gently side-to-side. The Adam Jones who has led the Langham kitchens to new glories. There are soft words passed between the pair, too far away and too quiet for one angel and one demon to possibly overhear, and Tony turns in Adam’s arms. Lets himself be held for a moment, hugged close. Adam kisses the tip of his nose. Tony lays a palm against his stubbled cheek. There is a kiss, quick and sweet, passed between them.

Aziraphale’s fingers find Crowley’s beneath the tablecloth.

When he turns back to the dining room, there is a new light in Tony Balerdi’s eyes. Purpose, pleasure; his cheeks flushed and his smile unwilling to be contained.

“Well, angel,” Crowley muses. “I think there’s plenty of happiness to be had there, without our influence.” He will deny to the second end of times the way his insides go soft and fluttery at it all.

Not so concerned with appearances, Aziraphale gives voice to a gentle sigh. “I suppose you might be right.”

Still, as they take their leave, twin wineglasses wobble, spilling shiraz into the laps of the argumentative, unpleasant pair a few tables over. There are shouts. Curses. No matter how much salt they use, how much white wine or hydrogen peroxide, the stains will never come out. Walking arm in arm to the waiting Bentley, suspiciously absent of parking tickets, neither angel nor demon will admit whose influence it had been.

Crowley will confess -- under duress -- to miracling the stain from Tony Balerdi’s white dress shirt, though.


End file.
